Wilder - 4. Daughter Dearest pt. 2: Politics and Rose

Episode Date: June 29, 2023

Who actually wrote the Little House books? For decades this question has loomed over the series. Was it Laura, a 65-year-old farm wife? Or her daughter Rose, one of the country's most successful freelance writers? But that's not the only conspiracy theory these heartwarming, cozy books have spawned. Many people also believe they are a Libertarian fantasy masquerading as tales for children. In this episode we tackle the question: how involved in the writing was Rose, really? And how much of Rose’s sometimes extreme political ideology ended up woven into Laura’s story? And if that weren't enough, we also look into whether Rose was responsible for funding the education of two of the most powerful right-wing operatives in America. While we're on the subject of politics, did Little House bankroll a failed run for President? And, finally, how did a man Laura never met, come to control the entire Little House world? We told you Rose was complicated. Go deeper: Caroline Fraser’s Prairie FiresVisit the Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Historic Homes in De Smet, South DakotaVisit Laura and Rose’s homes in Mansfield All About Kids! episode with Roger Lea MacBride, courtesy of Hennepin County LibraryRoger Lea MacBride’s presidential campaign ad courtesy of Carl Albert Center Archives Follow us for behind the scenes content! @WilderPodcast on TikTok@Wilder_Podcast on Instagram We want to hear from you! If listening to Wilder has changed your thinking on Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House books, send a voice memo to [e-mail]. You might be featured in our final episode ;) See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a podcast that takes you inside undercover investigations. In the second season, we've got an alphabet soup with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI all mixed up in the same case. So you do personal security all over the world and you have somebody call you and say, can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Colombia? No, no, no. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm's deal. Alphabet Boys, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

From I Heart Podcasts Supreme, the Battle for Ro, tells the story of the unlikely champions behind the landmark case Ro V Wade, starring Maya Hawke as 26-year-old lead attorney Sarah Weddington for challenging the Texas abortion laws in federal court. And Academy Award nominee William H. Macy as Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackman. Time is not the most important factor, getting it right is. Listen to the podcast Supreme,

the Battle for Roe on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So there is a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah, like does the US government really have alien technology? Or what about the future of AI? What happens when computers actually learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science,

history is riddled with unexplained events. Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Last week, on Daughter Dearest. Rose Wilder Lane was the only living child of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her husband, Almanzo.

She was born in South Dakota in 1886 when Laura was 19 years old. Much like Laura, Rose grew up in abject poverty. Unlike Laura, Rose was able to get an education and in the 1920s went on to become one of the most successful freelance writers in the country. In the early 1930s, Rose lost all her money in the stock market crash. She then began to collaborate with her mother on what would become the first book in the Little House series, Little House in the Big Woods. At the same time Rose was helping Laura,

Rose was secretly writing her own book based on Laura's life, called Let the Hurricane Roar. Rose secretly sold this book to the Saturday evening post. And when Laura realized her daughter's deception, this not surprisingly caused a huge rift in their relationship. A rift that was only overcome when Rose and Laura were forced to revise Farmer Boy together, the second book in the Little House series.

Laura was so disturbed by Rose using her story, and then weirdly combining it with the story of Laura's parents, Charles and Caroline, that sometime in the early 30s, shortly after Big Woods was published, Laura sat down and wrote down her own account of what had happened. She wrote it for herself and never meant it for publication. We know this book today as the first four years. This is where our story picks up. It's an important moment and one that would forever warp Laura and Rose's legacies. But they'd never know it. The truth is, the first four years is arguably the reason we are still talking about Rose

today, and not just because she's in it. It's publication, after both Laura and Rose's death, led people to start asking the question still being asked by some today. If this writing was so different from the rest of the series, did Laura actually write the Little House books? If you look at all the available information and you look at Laura's writing and you look at Rose Wilder Lane's writing, Rose Wilder laid wrote the books. We know that Rose and Laura had a complicated, tumultuous, intense, codependent relationship. I can only say that Rose Wilder Lane and

Lauren goes wilders relationship was complicated. And you know, all mother-daughter relationships are complicated, but it was fraught with an additional layer of professional rivalry. But how intertwined was their creative process? I think she said, Mom, tell me the stories, and then she wrote them down. She made up some stuff. She made it cozy.

It's impossible to leave her out. She has just woven into the whole story in ways that you cannot ignore. There are other people woven into this story who also can't be ignored. A decade after her death, Laura Ingalls Wilders' entire legacy landed in the hands of a man she'd never met. A man who almost immediately sold it to Hollywood

and then turned around and used the proceeds to make a run for President of the United States on the libertarian ticket, which brings us right back to the first four years. It was this man, Rosa's heir, who discovered the first four years in some of Rosa's papers. After this is claimed staff in 1968 came the discovery

of the manuscript that she never published, the first four years. So Roger, being the heir, took that manuscript to Harper and Rowe and Ursula Nordstrom immediately wanted to publish it. And thus was launched one of the literary world's great conspiracies. Decades later, people are still asking the question. Did Rose write the books herself?

Or was she just her mother's very heavy-handed editor? How much of Rose's political ideology ended up woven into Laura's story? How is Little House connected to the libertarian movement? And is Rose responsible for funding the education of two of the most powerful right-wing operatives in America? That's coming up on part two of Daughter Dearest, Politics and Rose. I'm Glynis McNichol, and this is Rose Wilder Name. The Let's begin in the early 1930s. As you will recall from our last episode, Laura has just finished writing Little House in the Big Woods. Rose has secretly written and sold Let The Hurricane Roar using facts from Laura's life

and childhood, but changing them around in confusing ways. Upon discovering this deception, Laura is understandably upset with Rose, but she's also confused. And it's this confusion that leads her to straighten out the facts of the story for herself. Nancy Tysde had Koopal, editor-in-chief of the Pioneer Girl project, believes when Lauren read Hurricane and saw how her parents' story had been reworked using details of her own life, she sat down and wrote the first four years. Her objection, I believe, was to the confusion that Rain added to the story. And that's why I think she wrote the first four years because she wanted to get her own story down the way it happened, at least in her mind, and not the way Lane would fictionalize it.

Keep in mind the timing of that writing, because here's where we're going to leap forward all the way to 1971, which is the year the first four years is published. Rose has been dead for three years. As everyone who owns the yellow little house on the Perry box set knows, the first four years is positioned as the last book in the Little House series. The issue is, there was nothing in the first four years publication that alerted readers to the fact

that it may have been written before the other books in the series and not as their conclusion. Nor was the reader made to understand that neither Rose nor Laura had ever intended the first four years to see the light of day. As Wayne told Harper's in the 60s and books not ready for publication, I thought my mother had destroyed it. It was never intended to be published as it's it. The first four years is jarring.

The tone is completely different from the rest of the books. As a child, I believed all the books had emerged straight from Laura's head, and this made the first four years especially shocking. Where had my Laura gone? This new Laura was cynical and angrier. Nothing in this world felt safe or appealing. Here's Laura's biographer, Caroline Fraser. It's so different and kind of disappointing in some regards. And to an adult,

who's studying Laura, it's an invaluable document because it shows her struggling to incorporate the worst moments of her life in a way that would fit in with the uplifting narrative, the arc of the series. It's definitely easier as a grown-up to understand the first four years as a first draft, something that was never intended for publication, written by Laura for herself as a way to keep her own memory separate from Rose's fictionalization of them. And it's also easier to understand why Laura dropped it. The subject matter was too unbearable. In the first four years of their marriage, Lauren Almanzo lost multiple crops. They went into enormous debt.

They lost an infant son. Almanzo was handicapped by dip theory and their home burned down. All before Laura turned 22. Can you blame her for not wanting to revisit that? She just couldn't do it. I mean, there just was no way that she could do it. And I think she thought about it after she had finished the series

in 1943, she definitely thought about returning probably to that manuscript and trying to work it up into a completed sequel to the series, but also I think there just wasn't any way to write about her adult experiences as an adult in a way that would have been acceptable to the children's audience. But that's not how the publishers presented the first four years, and the difference between this and the previous books inevitably led to questions. How could the writing be so different? Where was the Laura we knew in love from all the other books? Decades later, someone would try to answer this question.

It's at this point that Rose's story starts to loop back and forth in time a little bit. Right now, we're going to jump forward all the way to 1993 when a man named William Holtz published a biography of Rose called Ghost in the Little House. Holtz, a University of Missouri professor, felt Rose had not received her due for her impact on American culture and politics and went about rectifying that. Ghost in the Little House remains the only full biography of Rose, and Rose was absolutely deserving

of her own biography. But Holtz's description of Laura, and her and Rose's relationship, left readers aghast. Holtz referred to Laura throughout the book, sarcastically and demeaningly as Mama Bess, Rose's pet name for her mother. And seemed to take on Rose's view that all the hurdles in Rose's life were indeed Laura's fault.

In Holtz's view, Laura was an exacting and unloving mother and Rose was a deeply sympathetic and beleaguered daughter. But the real shock was the seven-page appendix, which laid out Holt's argument that it was Rose who had written the books. At the time Ghost in Little House was published, the public's understanding of Laura was almost entirely the product of the books and the hit television show. To the world at that point, Rose was perennially a small child.

Now here was this harpy mother and her silently-tolling daughter. The book inevitably landed like a bomb in the little house world, and low. A full-blown conspiracy was born. Part of the reason the conspiracy was able to flourish so well was that a sort of vacuum of information had always existed around Laura's authorship of the books. During her lifetime, Rose had relentlessly insisted that her mother had done all of this work on her own. And it's hard to gauge how involved Rose actually was because Laura didn't keep a journal, and for a long time their collaboration happened in person.

All we really have to go by are some letters of correspondence between the mother and daughter. So when Holtz pressed on the unlikeness of a 65-year-old woman, penning these masterpieces without help, and then used Rose's letters and journal entries to back up the argument that Rose had been a collaborator, the theory began to take root that Rose was the true author because there was very little to counter it. So who actually wrote the little housebooks? Laura or Rose?

From an obsessively researched 2023 viewpoint, So who actually wrote the Little House books? Laura or Rose? From an obsessively researched 2023 viewpoint, it seems clear that the answer probably lies somewhere between the two, much closer to Laura than to Rose. Caroline Fraser believes there are absolutely scenes written by Rose in some of the books, including some of the scenes that stand out to readers as a specially political. Like the Fourth of July scene in Little Town on the Prairie, where Laura includes a speech about the glorious Fourth and how most of the people there are trying to pull

themselves up by their bootstraps. She then reprints the entirety of the Declaration of Independence, which I must tell you is deeply confusing to me as a child in Canada. And follows this with Laura's desire to say amen at the end of the reading. I think that we can identify based on manuscript evidence and also style. We can certainly identify certain scenes, you know, the famous worth of July scenes in Farmer Boy and Little Town. I think it is that she clearly wrote and kind of inserted herself, her own voice into

writing. Fraser also thinks that Rose and Laura may have brought different strengths to the books, including the fact that Rose may have been more talented at writing dialogue than her mother. You can see Rose, I think you can hear her in some of the dialogue. She was quite gifted at doing that compared to her mother who I think that was a really hard thing for Laura to reconstruct natural dialogue, especially at the beginning.

So you can see their contrasting styles coming through where Rose was bringing this kind of sense of stability and safety and sort of gentleness to the stories, some of which is quite necessary, I think. But in other moments, you can see Laura's vision, which was a much more stark, more plain, more confrontational, a little bit almost. This was the way it was. This is how hard it was to live this life. That's Laura. There's also the fact we have Rose's own writing to go by. We know what Rose's authorship looks like. Here's Pamela Smith-Hill.

Rose Wilder Lane's writing is... It's very distant, it's very kind of turgid prose. She uses lots of abstract rather than concrete vocabulary. When you read Freeland and what the Hurricane wore, it's almost as if Rose Weatherlane is trying too hard. They don't have that sense of effortless artistry that the little housebooks have. And then there are passages in both of those books where she basically plagiarizes her mother's pioneer girl text.

So she'll take a description from pioneer girl at eloquent, beautiful description of a pioneer sunset that is lyrical and poetic. And she will plop it into the middle of Let the Hurricane War and Freeland, but she uses abstract vocabulary and it's kind of clumsy and soft-mouric. So I think there are things we can never know about the chemistry between L'Oingles-Wilder and Rose-Wilder Lane. But the idea that Rose Wilder Lane is

singly responsible for the little house books. Doesn't hold water when you look at her own writing. Both Nancy Teistag, Kupel and Caroline Fraser agree. It's almost impossible to credit Rose with authorship. I believe Rose was just really a brilliant editor. I think she was an editor and she was an agent. And people don't really understand the extent to which editors and agents shape people's writing and how they tell their stories.

Their goal, for the most part, is to help people tell their story the best way possible. And that's what Lane is doing. for the most part is to help people tell their story the best way possible. And that's what Lane is doing. They both contributed a lot, but Laura was the person who wrote the books. You know, Rose was an editor. She was certainly a heavier editor than most people might conceive,

but that also is not unheard of. Whatever her limitations is a writer were, there's no question Rose was an exceptional editor. Even Laura's official editor, Ursula Nordstrom, once remarked that the only manuscripts had ever came to her perfectly formed were that of Laura's and Charlotte's web author, E.B. White. Laura herself always recognized this as one

of Rose's strengths. In a letter she once told her daughter, I'm glad you like my use of words in my descriptions, but without your fine touch, it would be a flop. I think to people who don't have that experience with publishing that may be a shock, but it's certainly a factor in many works, but I'm not one of those

people who thinks that the book should be by Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane now. I don't think that's that's not how it works. In my opinion, the story is Wilder's voice that childlike wonder at the world is Wilder's and it is laying that it's helping her shape this. So Jo as a reasonably objective observer knowing all this what are your thoughts now on who wrote the little housebooks? It sounds to me like Rose is the editor that all of us would love to have. That she is engaged,

that she is hands-on and not just hands-on, but that she's getting her hands dirty in a manuscript, which I personally think is very important for an editor, but I will lean towards, given all of the information that we have, and a lean towards Laura writing the books, and Rose editing. I agree. Rose just sounds like the editor you dream of, you know, who really understands what you're after and helps you get there.

But we also know what Rose's books look like, and there's no magic in them. Like, all of this magic is clearly coming from Laura. And I also just want to vary, like, and there's no magic in them. Like all of this magic is clearly coming from Laura. And I also just want to vary like basic level. I find it really difficult to imagine that Laura at age 65 would be like, okay, Rose, here are my stories. That's one thing. But please feel free to sign my name to this and then send me out in the world as a

liar. Because that's like, that's a lot. That's a lot. Why would either of them try to execute that on a very, very practical level? And why would Laura be out there taking credit for something that wasn't her work? But, you know, there's also something

about the first four years that reminds me of the Harper Lee book, Ghosts at a Watchman. Yes, yes, that's exactly what I've been thinking this entire time. This smells of ghost at a watchman. I think we need to explain how this actually came about. So ghost at a watchman was it turns out the original draft of T'Kill a Mockingbird

that Harper Lee turned into her editor and her editor said, no, pull out this part where you're a kid and turn that into a book, which came out as to Kill a Mockingbird, which is an American classic, which is an American classic. Decades later after Harper Lee's death, they find Go Set a Watchman and republish it as a new undiscovered book with very little framing of

how this book exists and why, and everyone read it and was like, what is this? Why is Atticus a racist? Where is this unwieldy terrible book coming from? And it launched a lot of questions over while did Harper Lee actually write to Clawmockingberg, but I think the same thing happened, which is they found an original unpublished draft, published it without context, and all it did was lead to more questions. Exactly. Exactly. It goes out to watch men much like the first four years, was never supposed to see the light of day. And there's a reason that these books sat in the drawer. And then there's a reason, of course,

that they were later published. And I think that that reason is money, money, money. Money, money, money. And also the deceptiveness of publishing it is like a new book. Like, if they'd been published within the context, they were written. That could be fascinating from research purposes. But published is like, here's a new book.

It's like, well, what is this? Yeah, exactly, exactly. Finally enough, Go Set a Watchman has a ton of politics in it, too, that were really questionable. And I think what we're headed into after the break is like, how much of Rose's question will politics or in Laura's books? In the podcast, Alphabet Boys,

we take you inside undercover investigations. I'm Trevor Aronson. And in our second season, we have an Alphabet soup with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI all mixed up in the same case. At the center of this story is Flavio, but who is Flavio? I see movies with arm dealers on TV. Okay, I'm going there for the A. But I'm gonna die.

When I land, there's Flavio in a suit. It's like follow me. And he slams down his badge in my passport. And I'm like, uh, something's going on here. So you do personal security all over the world, and you have somebody call you and say, can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Colombia? Not, not certified grenades, a lot of ammunition. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm steal.

Who are the cops? Who are the criminals? And is anyone really who they claim to be? Listen to alphabet boys on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Does the US government really have alien technology? And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI?

What happens when computers learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government hover ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. We spent a decade applying critical thinking to some of the most bizarre phenomenon civilization and beyond. Each week week we dive deep into unsolved mysteries, conspiracy theories, and actual conspiracies. You've heard about these things, but what's the full story?

Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows. you find your favorite shows. The Road Testers and Supporters alike are lined up outside the United States Supreme Court this afternoon, as the decision in the most hotly debated case in years is set to be delivered. From I Heart Podcasts Supreme, the Battle for Roe, tells the story of the unlikely champions behind the landmark case Roe, tells the story of the unlikely champions behind the landmark case Roe V Wade.

Sir, I graduated the top quarter of my class. We just don't have a spot for you. Starring Maya Hawk as 26-year-old lead attorney Sarah Weddington for challenging the Texas abortion laws in federal court and Academy Award nominee William H. Macy as Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackman. My chief qualification being, I'm uncontroversial. You know how we both ended up on the Supreme Court? Politics? Damn right. This may be the longest of shots, but it's also the last chance for a lot of women. Time is not the most important factor, getting it right in. Trying to get you to stand for something, man. Now go to it.

Listen to Supreme, the Battle for Ro, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. As a kid, the little Housebooks felt like a story of family, hard work, and adventure. As an adult, it's easier to see there might be another message beneath all the coziness. I loved that this was her story, and I loved that it came from her memories. That's politics writer Rebecca Traster. She loved the little housebooks growing up. And I think especially growing up with my own mom and her sister who had these memories of a rural life

that was so distant from anything that I, any way that I lived in the suburbs, like I really valued that kind of storytelling about, you know, remember how we used to do things. Coming back to them as a grown-up, she was less concerned about the authorship question of the books than the politics she found there. Politics that sounded an awful lot like Rose. She was just manipulating her mother's memories to serve her own political purposes.

There are many people who consider a little house to be a libertarian fantasy. And one of the main reasons for this is that Rose in later life became a strident voice in the libertarian movement. But how did she get there? And how much of the politics people claim to see in Little House are actually hers and how much are the politics people claim to see in Little House are actually hers, and

how much are actually Laura's? The fact that Rose's politics shapes these books is really important to understanding American history. These days we understand complicated to be a word we attach to any woman who is living outside her culturally prescribed role, but Rose really was very complicated. She was incredibly smart and talented in a time and place that did not reward or support women for being so. She suffered debilitating bouts of depression before we understood it to be a disease. She'd been divorced, she'd

lost a child, she'd traveled widely, she made a lot of money and was very bad at managing it. For all the financial support she gave her parents, they were often supporting her. She had no living children, but repeatedly adopted sons, and she had increasingly extreme political views. These last two are key, and dominate the legacy of Little House in bizarre ways. Let's start with the increasingly extreme political views. Rose had always had strong beliefs, largely rooted in the triumph of the individual over the government. You can see this theme

reoccurring in her stories of Jack London and Herbert Hoover, and later in the novels about her parents, especially her father. But during the Depression, these beliefs hit a fever pitch. Rose-loved FDR and Eleanor. In a number of letters, she wished them both dead and volunteered to do the killing, which was not unusual for her time in place as Pamela Smith Hill notes. We do know that the Wilders opposed the New Deal. They were not great fans of FDR, but almost everybody in Wright County, Missouri at that

time, almost everybody in Southern Missouri at that time was opposed to the New Deal. So in that sense, it wasn't unusual. In 1935, at the height of the Depression, Rose's rants, until now mostly contained to letters, moved on to the pages of the Saturday evening post. Rose had left Rocky Ridge at this point, though it was still deep in edits with Laura for on the Banks of Plum Creek.

The essay she wrote for the Saturday evening post was titled Crito. It argued for individual liberty, and to some extent, it argued in support of fascist regimes. Rose leaned on her travel experience in communist Russia to make the argument that the new deal was leading to a terrible future for the country. Many of the personal anecdotes she included to make this argument were not surprisingly total fiction. But people loved it. The essay was a hit. Herbert Hoover, now former president, who had long

tried to disassociate himself from Rose, called for a million copies to be printed. Credo was reissued as a pamphlet and would become a foundational document in the libertarian movement, which was then still in its infancy. It also signaled a shift for Rose into political commentary, which she would increasingly lean into for the rest of her life. Readers of Rose's novels let the hurricane roar in Freeland will not have to guess that her politics. She includes them with a heavy hand. But the question that plagues little house readers is, how much of Rose's politics are in

the Little House series? And perhaps more importantly, did Laura share these beliefs? The answer is yes, to an extent. It's quite clear in letters that she wrote to Rose that she just accepted kind of unquestioningly a lot of Rose's crazier assertions and conspiracy theories. That's Caroline Fraser again. They certainly shared at the beginning of FDR's push for the New Deal. They shared this, you know, dismay and ultimately contempt for New Deal policies for FDR, especially for Eleanor Roosevelt.

I mean, Eleanor Roosevelt somehow came in for the worst of much of what they had to say. Certain scenes in the books like the Fourth of July scene we mentioned earlier, have always stood out. And as a kid with no knowledge of American history or politics, it was jarring to go from the day-to-day experience of the Ingles family to these broad reminations on the idea of America. When you look at a book like Little Town on the Prairie with the big fourth of July episode and the speech that Rosewater Lane clearly inserted into that manuscript that seems to sound very libertarian in its focus, no wonder people have assumed that Wilder may have shared

her daughter's politics. On the other hand, if you look at children's books from this period, and you remember that little town on the prairie was published as the world was about to descend into war, you find the same patriotic themes, the same patriotic ideas that come filtered through books like Johnny Traumane and Cady Woodlawn. So I think, in part part because the Little House books have endured

as some of these other books haven't, we read into them perhaps more of Rose's politics than we should have. Perhaps the most useful evidence in this argument is Rose's own writing. We talked about freelance in the last episode. Rose's second novel, based largely on the early years of her parents' marriage and their life in Dakota territory. This was the novel Laura was okay with Rose writing, unlike Let the Hurricane Roar, which Rose wrote in secret.

Caroline Fraser describes Freeland as straight propaganda. It contains lines like, living is never easy. That all human history is a record of achievement in disaster, and that our great asset is the valor of the American spirit. Freeland is not a good book. And while it was successful at the time of publication, the only reason we still know about it is its association with Laura and the Little House series.

Had Laura wanted the Little House books to be overtly political, she certainly had that option. Instead, she was always more focused on sticking to the daily details of life and family. She didn't publicize it in the way that Rose did. I mean, Rose made it her life's work to, you know, publicize these ideas in any way that she could. Laura didn't seem to be interested in doing that. But Rose promoted the opposite.

She wanted people to believe the libertarian message was implicit in the Little House books. She wanted people to understand them as a libertarian fantasy, which is part of the reason why she insisted the books were true. The details of the Ingles survival on the prairie supported her ideology. Well, there's this whole period after her mother's death when she becomes quite adamant about insisting that everything in the books is true, and that the books represent an argument for her political stance, you know, that they're an argument for self-reliance, that they're a monument to hard work and, you know, pulling yourself up by your big straps.

The Little House books are tied into libertarian politics for more reasons than this. Let's go back to Rose's early years as a journalist. For much of her life, starting in the early 1920s, Rose traveled widely. More than once Rose took it upon herself to financially support some of the young people she met on her travels. Often young men, though not always. Here's Reverend Nicholas Inman.

He's the director of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home in Museum in Mansfield, Missouri. She was always finding people in different parts of the world and embracing them and encouraging them, something that she paid for their educations. She just had that surrogate mother-grandmother role for so many people. Later in life, Rose took on a young man named Roger Lee McBride. In 1938, Rose relocated to Danbury, Connecticut, where she would remain for the rest of her life.

A few years later in the mid-1940s, Rose met McBride. He was a teenager at the time. Rose was an extraordinary person. I met her when I was 17, and she was about 60. Here's McBride describing meeting Rose for the very first time, and in interview he gave in their early 90s for a television show called All About Kids. My father was an editor of the reader's digest

and had condensed one of the books she wrote in later life. And he thought she was fascinating and could teach me a lot. And I had the same kind of curious mind about affairs and ideas that Rose in fact had, and she recognized that. Rose and McBride established an immediate connection, one that would also remain for the rest of her life. I used to hitchhike from our home in New York near the Digest to hurt then farm and Connecticut

small farm on Saturdays and a weeder gardens and health clear shed sand, stuff like that in the afternoon. In the evening, she'd cook her famous chicken pie for me. And we would talk until one or two in the morning about all the things that a 17-year-old wanted to ask an older, wiser person, stories about everybody she knew from Jack London to Herbert Hoover and her opinions about events in the world and theories and so on. And in the end, she adopted me informally as her grandson. I used to call her grandma. And it's still a little strange for meally as her grandson. I used to call her grandma.

And it's still a little strange for me to call her Rose because I always did call her grandma. She was a riveting person and a greater influence on me than everybody else in my life put together during the formative stages. McBride also strongly shared Rose's libertarian views. He would later say he was fascinated by her mind. Here's Bill Anderson. Because Rose was such a proponent of conservative politics

and anti-new deal procedures, she looked upon any young person that she met as someone that she could show the other side of the coin to as far as governmental doings such as the New Deal. During the time McBride knew Rose, she grew in prominence in the libertarian movement. William F. Buckley would later refer to Rose as one of the three furies of modern libertarianism,

along with Ein Rand and Isabel Patterson. In the mid-1950s, Rose donated money, little house residual money, to fund a free market academy in Colorado called the Freedom School. The school had been started by a businessman inspired by Rose's writing. The Freedom School was attended by Charles and David Coke, the billionaire brothers who funded the Tea Party movement

and have been widely credited for pushing the Republican Party towards its more extreme right wing. In 1980, David ran for president on the Libertarian ticket. Both Koch brothers claimed to have been heavily influenced by the teachings of the Freedom School. So how does Roger Lee McBride factor into all this? I think it's important to pause at this point and remember, Rose is not a young woman anymore. She hasn't been for quite some time.

When Laura died in early 1957, Rose was already 70 and she needed help managing. She needed help managing her mother's estate. She needed help managing the little house estate. She needed help managing her mother's estate. She needed help managing the little house estate. She needed help managing her own correspondences. And she increasingly leaned on McBride now out of law school to fill this role for her and then envision that he would continue to do so after her death. Because Mrs. Lane knew that with her death, the family line would be completed. She designated Roger Lehman Bride to handle all the business of the Little House books.

And after Mrs. Lane's death in 1968, came the discovery of the manuscript that she never published the first four years. In the podcast Alphabet Boys, we take you inside undercover investigations. I'm Trevor Aronson. And in our second season, we have an Alphabet soup with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI all mixed up in the same case. At the center of this story is Flavio, but who is Flavio? I see movies with arm dealers on TV. Okay, I'm going there for the A.I.

But I'm going to die. When I land, there's Flavio in a suit. It's like, follow me. And he slams down his badge in my passport. And I'm like, uh, it's like follow me. And he slams down his badge in my passport. And I'm like, uh, something's going on here. So you do personal security all over the world and you have somebody call you and say,

can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Colombia? Not, not specified grenades, a lot of ammunition. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm steal, who are the cops, who are the criminals? And is anyone really who they claim to be? Listen to alphabet boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know.

Does the US government really have alien technology? And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. We spent a decade applying critical thinking to some of the most bizarre phenomenon civilization and beyond.

Each week, we dive deep into unsolved mysteries, conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies. You've heard about these things, but what's the full story? Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows. you find your favorite shows. I Heart Podcasts Supreme, the Battle for Row, tells the story of the unlikely champions behind the landmark case, Roe V Wade. Sir, I graduated the top quarter of my class. We just don't have a spot for you. Starring Maya Hawk as 26-year-old lead attorney,

Sarah Weddington, for challenging the Texas abortion laws in federal court and Academy Award nominee, William H. Macy, as Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackman. My chief qualification being, I'm uncontroversial. You know how we both ended up on the Supreme Court? Politics? Damn right. This may be the longest of shots,

but it's also the last chance for a lot of women. Time is not the most important factor, getting it right in. Trying to get you to stand for something, man. Now go do it. Listen to Supreme, the Battle for Ro, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. In the fall of 1968, the age of 81, shortly before she was set to start out on a three-year world tour, Rose Wilder Lane died in her sleep. Since there were no descendants of Laura and El Manzel Wilder other than rows. It was a responsibility to have some successor appointed to handle the big business of the Little House books.

So rows dies. Laura is already dead. None of Laura's sisters had any children. There are no direct family errors to the legacy of these now classic children's books. And because of this, the rights to Little House and the Prairie land squarely in the hands of Rose's soul-appointed heir, Roger Lee McBride.

When she died, she left me her estate, which of course included her mother's, with the expectation I'd carry out a number of commitments she wanted carried out after her death. That's right. The rights to Little House on the Prairie, Laura's entire, now beloved, life story, and life's work landed in the hands of a man she'd never met, who bore no relation to her whatsoever. McBride took his responsibility seriously, Yet he's also the reason so much conspiracy exists around Laura and Rose. Remember the first four years? The ninth book in the series,

the one that was published after Laura's death and was so jarring to readers? Well, this is how it gets published. I found the manuscript to the first four years the last of Laura's books at Muxed Rose's papers, and I edited that one. Shortly after inheriting everything little house, McBride discovers the manuscript

for the first four years in Laura's papers and sends it directly to her publishers. So Roger developed a good rapport with the editor, Ursula Nordstrom, and after Mrs. Lane's death in 1968 came the discovery of the manuscript that she never published the first four years. So Roger being the heir and the person attended to Little House business took that manuscript to Harper and Role by that time, and Ursula Nordstrom immediately wanted to publish it.

So that was the first of the additional wilder writings that Roger offered to Harper and Roe and to a very, very interested reading audience who cried more and more and more. They wanted the war to read written by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The legendary children's book editor, Ursula Nordstrom, who had overseen the publication of the little house books since the late 1930s, is initially thrilled. And then somewhat puzzled by the book. Still, despite some misgivings, she publishes it. This is 1971.

Then, in 1973, McBride takes Little House to Hollywood and sells the option to a TV executive name Ed Friendly. We're going to talk at length about how the television show came to be in a future episode. But the short version is Little House on the Prairie, the TV version was immediately a huge hit, and vastly increased the amount of money McBride was now making from the Little House copyright. Money he took, and used to launch a run for president on the libertarian ticket in 1976. This year, perhaps as never before,

millions of Americans are looking for an alternative to the candidates of the two traditional parties. Consider the ideas of Roger McBride. He may be the alternative you're looking for. Roger L. McBride, Libertarian Party candidate for President of the United States. He was very dedicated to a list of requests that Rose made that he carry out after her death and carrying on her libertarian philosophy, which he hold hardedly adhered to, led him to this bid for the presidency. He had no ideas that he would ever win, but of course he wanted to get libertarianism, individualism before the American public.

McBride is not surprisingly a divisive figure in the Little House world. He was very involved in the establishment of the Little House sites and generous with his time. When we were on the road last summer going to all the houses, this was apparent. The McBride name came up frequently, like when we first encountered Rose's possessions in the Ingles house in Dismet. Since Rose's name is during her lifetime, we have many more of her belongings. This marble chop dresser belonged to her, as well as the chamber pot and the commode. The McBrides did come to see us, Roger Lamey-Bride. We have photos of him walking through the house, pointing at stuff, you know.

Very lucky. The things that were roses in here, were they always here or were they donated by the McBrides? They were donated by the McBrides, so this would have been roses. Though many people involved with the houses are aware of the fraught aspect of his politics, they're grateful for his support.

Here's Reverend Inman from the Wilder Home in Mansfield, Missouri again. I mean, he was such an interesting person himself. No, his political career, he was involved here at the Wilder Home, in helping give so many items to different historic sites, to spread Mrs. Wilder's legacy out so much to the Hoover Library.

You know, I think he really did, he was a good custodian to make sure those things were preserved. But in preserving Rose's memory and giving her her due in Little House history, McBride also inadvertently led to the real explosion of the authorship controversy. When William Holtz, the author of Ghost in Little House, the 1993 biography of Rose we talked about, started researching the book, Holtz went to McBride for his approval and support to access Rose's records. McBride willingly gave it. He wanted Rose to get her due.

Holtz failed to mention, however, his entire authorship argument. And when McBride read the published book, he was shocked and dismayed and asked the Laura sites to pull it from their shelves. He said, the book can only serve to disappoint children who read Little House. Instead of fueling authorship debates, McBride gave Rose her own chapter of the story. Before his death in 1995, McBride took it upon himself to launch an entire children's book series about Rose, into which he strongly wove his and Lane's political philosophies

of libertarian independence. I thought, gee, I know Rose will enough and have all these stories she told me, verbally and in writing, that I can write about her as a seven-year-old girl and growing up to 17 and get it pretty well right. So the publisher's encouraged me to do it and took me three years to do, but I've done it. The spin-offs called the Rose Years are marketed as an extension of Laura's original series, though to put it mildly, they lack the cultural impact of Little House. But where does that leave us with the original Little House series? They've certainly been wielded on behalf of the Libertarian idea.

But can they themselves be considered a Libertarian fantasy? The answer itself changes with time. I mean, I guess I just get interested, like, under a microscope. Have a different generation, see it? That's Lizzie Skernick. She teaches the little house books in a children's literature class at NYU. And of course, you have the generations where they're like, this is a libertarian fantasy. Then you have the generations that are so interested in, like, how it depicts privation, you know.

So the books have so many aspects to them. The truth is, the Little House books may be less a libertarian fantasy than Laura creating a fantasy version of her childhood. But how much of a fantasy? The only way to answer that question is to take a look at what was actually going on in Laura's life versus what she decided to include in the books. And that's where we're going next week.

We're going to fact check Little House and go to some of the places Laura could not bear to revisit in her writing. Wilder is written and hosted by me, Glonismic Nickel. Our story editors are Joe Piazza and Emily Marinoff. Our senior producer is Emily Marinoff. Our producers are Mary Du, Shino Ozaki, and Jessica Crine-Chitch. Our associate producer is Lauren Philip, sound designed in mixing by Amanda Rose Smith. Our theme and additional music was composed by Lisa McCoy.

We are executive produced by Jo Piazza, Nikki Tor, Ali Perry, and me. If you're enjoying Wilder, please consider rating and reviewing us on Apple Podcasts. It actually helps us out quite a lot. Thank you to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society in Dismitt, South Dakota, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum in Mansfield, Missouri, and a special shout out to Caroline Fraser, whose book Prairie Fires is the motherload on

Rose and Laura's relationship. Special thanks to the Hennepin County Library for the recording of Roger Lee McBride and to the Carl Albert Congressional Researchin County Library for the recording of Roger Lee McBride and to the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Study Center for the recording of Roger Lee McBride's presidential campaign. Thank you to CDM Studios. Thank you, Kathleen, for being my emotional support system. Please see our show notes if you want to know more about the people we interviewed, the places we visited, the books we mentioned. You can also find our contact info there if you want to write to us with your own thoughts and questions. We're going to be including listener responses in our final episode.

If you have thoughts on Wilder or the Little House series, please send us a voice memo to WilderPodcast at gmail.com. Follow us on Instagram at Wilder underscore podcast and on TikTok at WilderPodcast, where you can see behind-the-scenes footage from all our travels. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week. Alphabet Boys is a podcast that takes you inside undercover investigations. In the second season, we've got an alphabet soup, with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI all mixed up in the same case.

So you do personal security all over the world, and you have somebody call you and say, can you get your names and guns for this guy in Colombia? No, no, no, no, no. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm's deal. Alphabet Boys, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. From I Heart Podcasts Supreme, the Battle for Roe, tells the story of the unlikely champions behind the landmark

case, Roe V Wade, starring Maya Hawke as 26-year-old lead attorney, Sarah Weddington, for challenging the Texas abortion laws and federal court. And Academy Award nominee, William H. Macy as Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackman. Time is not the most important factor, getting it right is. Listen to the podcast Supreme, the Battle for Row on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So there is a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah, like does the US government really have alien technology?

Or what about the future of AI? What happens when computers actually learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you find your favorite shows.